Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones (D) scorched newly-elected Home Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for pointing to “the human coronary heart “as “the issue” in mass shootings within the wake of the Maine bloodbath that killed 18 individuals final week.
Jones, a “Tennessee Three” member who joined protesters calling for stricter gun management earlier than Republicans expelled him from the state’s Home in April, reacted to a clip of Johnson telling Fox Information’ Sean Hannity that guns aren’t the problem and “now we have to guard the suitable of the residents to guard themselves.”
“I wish to let Speaker Johnson know that in my religion custom, once you put objects above individuals, we name that idolatry. And once you put the lives of individuals below cash and marketing campaign contributions, we name that idolatry,” Jones advised MSNBC’s Jen Psaki in a plea for “frequent sense gun legal guidelines” on Sunday.
“And so let’s not use religion and false ideas and prayers to gloss over this subject.”
Jones continued his response to Johnson, who provided his prayers in response to the Maine bloodbath, by calling on lawmakers to hope with their “toes and fingers and signing laws.”
He went on to quote mass shootings at Nashville’s Covenant Faculty, the place three kids and three adults had been killed in March, and one other in 2018 that left 4 individuals useless at a Waffle Home within the metropolis’s Antioch neighborhood.
Jones referred to as Johnson’s feedback “insulting to grieving communities” to try to “use religiosity” to dismiss others’ ache till the following mass taking pictures.
The lethal assault in Maine final week is amongst 580 mass shootings in America this 12 months, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Over 35,700 individuals have been killed resulting from gun violence in America this 12 months.
“And so I hope that Speaker Johnson doesn’t wait till a mass taking pictures hits his neighborhood act. However I hope that he acts in keeping with not a difficulty of left or proper however acknowledges that this subject of gun violence is an ethical subject of proper and unsuitable and historical past will watch the place he stands on this time,” Jones stated.
“Historical past will decide him, his kids will decide him and future generations will decide him as a result of we’re sick and uninterested in residing on this world of preventable mass loss of life due to an excessive minority which have hijacked our democracy.”
